What if you spent every day looking for One Beautiful Thing?

My Gal, the Zombie

Young Justine McKinney has always known she wanted to be a painter, but it was only a couple of years ago that she hit upon the idea of using her own face and body as her canvas. I’m especially enamored of her way of using black space to make her body seem tiny like in the Queen of Hearts makeup above.

According to the artist, she spends between 10 and 20 hours on each of her looks. What wonderful patience and focus she must have! I know it’s not unusual for an artist to work on a traditional painting for many hours, but at least when it’s not on you, you can take a break, walk away, get some sleep, answer the door… I’m really impressed with McKinney’s commitment (and I’m also pretty entertained by the mental picture of the look on the restaurant delivery person’s face when she answers the door mid-look).

Not only is she a wildly talented makeup artist, McKinney is also a sometimes horror host on My Gal, the Zombie along with buddies Patricia Krmpotich and Dan Conner!

What amazing talent! I’ve been doing face painting on my students at summer camp and know how time consuming that is. Up to 20 hours to achieve these finished looks, therefore, seems pretty accomplished to me. I don’t think I could achieve this in 30 hours. And she’s working on herself which must add another layer of difficulty. I’ll need to show these to my kids. They’ll be inspired.

They refuse to let me put them online unfortunately. Some also have some copyright issues which is another reason they can’t be shared. They made an amazing one two years ago when we were at the Evans City Cemetery where Romero filmed the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead. The main thing is that they have fun making them.

That’s wonderful. My friends and I spent a lot of our teen years making our own movies and parodies, and except for me, they all ended up working in film, art, or photography! (Not sure where I went wrong…) It’s a great way to learn.